Cataclysm!: Compelling Evidence of a Cosmic Catastrophe in 9500 B.C.

This rating is misleading because the book is really a combination of a one, two, three, four and five star book.For starters, do yourself a favor and read parts 3-the end first, then part 2 and finally part 1. Because organizationally the book is a 2-star and the writing in part 1 is hard to understand unless you like reading the encyclopedia. Part 1 is an exhaustive and exhausting history of geological research designed to prove how much the writers know and how bad they are at communicating it. So, unless you are a Ph.D., skip part 1, which I rate as a 1 star, until the end.Second, the book gets a five star for assembling data that is not well known, even today 15 years after publication. Similar to Sitchin or Drunvalo, the writers do a good job of finding data to support what would otherwise be a very exotic theory of global disaster in the recent past.However, the book does only a four star job of convincing the reader of the thesis that it all happened very quickly and dramatically because the dates can only be reduced to a span of time that is 4000 years long (from 10,000 years ago to 14,000 years ago). They use the average of the dates to make the argument that it all happened at once. I would have given this aspect of the book an even lower rating if it wasn't for the fact that they do a very good job of showing broad evidence for global episodes that did significant violence to the biosphere, suggesting that something very sudden and cataclysmic occurred.Finally this book gets a three star for the relevance of the data. While the data is sufficient to support their arguments, they fail to use enough up to data and competing data to make their points stronger. In other words, they cherry pick from the scientific record.In summary, the book is compelling, as the title suggests, but not completely convincing. I am convinced that the ice age did not happen as predominant theories suggest. So they do a good job of debunking predominant theories. But I am not convinced that Earth history enfolded in the way they suggest. For example a period of extensive volcanic activity can explain a good deal of the evidence. If the writers were lawyers arguing their case, they could easily win a civil case where you only need a "preponderance of the evidence". But the higher standard in criminal cases of "beyond a shadow of a doubt" is too high a standard for this book. Overall "Cataclysm" is an entertaining and educational read.

If you are interested in the hypotheses of Graham Hancock, Robert Schoch and Randall Carlson, you will like this book. Hancock accepts the Comet Impact Hypothesis for the end of the Ice Age and the resulting Younger Dryas time period. Robert Schoch supports the idea that the glacial melting was caused by a coronal mass ejection from the sun. Randall Carlson says that they may both be components of one larger event, but continues to say that we probably still have more to learn about this period of history. Those familiar with the works of Zecharia Sitchin know that he believes that the cuneiform tablets of the Sumerians describe the planet Nibiru destroying the planet Tiamat in the early times of the solar system.Delair and Allan take a somewhat different approach to this event. Delair is an Oxford geologist and Allan a Science Historian. They are both eminently qualified to weigh in on the problem. They interpret the Sumerian description of the demise of Tiamat to be a far more recent event. Rather than the planet Nibiru, they propose that a rogue planet entered the solar system about 11,500 years ago, decimated Tiamat and left the asteroid belt in its place and then went on to a close fly-by with Earth which caused havoc on this planet, causing the events of the Younger Dryas.To support this claim, they cite a huge amount of evidence, both geological and biological, as well as supporting evidence from traditional descriptions from around the world of a catastrophic time which we know as Noah's flood. The massive amount of hard evidence includes geologically recent crumpling and upheavaling of the lithosphere, as well as vast global coverage of volcanic activity at the same time. The biological evidence they present includes the vast number of species and genera which became extinct at this time as well as the global deposits of oscious brecia which have been discovered. This brecia includes the remains of huge numbers of broken bones of multiple animal - and human - species jumbled together with broken trees, tree limbs with leaves attached, the remains of numerous plant types, and significant amounts of mud, clay, volcanic ash and gravel. In the higher latitudes this much is frozen solid and has been for 11,500 years. In other places it is found dried and packed together in caves and crevices, and in still others, buried meters below current ground level.Delair and Allan's hypothesis may be the overarching theory that unites Hancock, Schoch and Sitchin, and in the process provides a clearer picture of the end of the Ice Age and the Younger Dryas. It is not without new and shocking components, such as the possibility that glaciers may not have covered North America at all. But for all those who are interested in the question of the truth of what happened on this planet in the remote past, Cataclysm should be required reading.

When I first read this book some 20 years ago, I was more astonished by the quality of the research than the extraordinary results. An important aspect of my research over the years is the way in which people convince themselves of facts that turn out not to be fact, yet have the power to sweep communities, indeed the world. This is a basic principle of the history and philosophy of science and it helps to explain how bad theories become dominant or, in one of my special fields, unhelpful management practices become dominant. This extraordinarily intelligent book sets out to reveal one of these unfounded beliefs.It does an excellent job of calling into question, and possibly demolishing, one of the most powerful theories of contemporary evolution, geology, and world history, the ice age. And it does this not by wild assertion but by patient accumulation and organisation of a vast range of scientific research, often recovering earlier records commonly disregarded in contemporary science, and cross-referring and building across a very wide range of scientific disciplines.As a brilliant example of patient research, bold thinking and careful argument, this book is really a must read for any thoughtful individual. The very least it will do is bring you to the point of questioning blind assumptions. In a period in which fake news based on hearsay evidence or none at all is much in the news, When the Earth Nearly Died offers a very different diet. Strongly recommended.In another tone, and with a different angle of view, interested readers in this work would also value some of the essays and ideas of Owen Barfield, first in the history of human consciousness in relationship to language ( Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning ) and on epistemology – considering the models and constructs of knowledge that we use ( Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry . In particular he demolishes the assumption that a description of the world that depends on evolutionary events can be used to describe the world before those evolutionary events took place. Poetic Diction: A Study in MeaningSaving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

The authors have done an amazing job researching and collating all the information in this wonderful book. It has provided answers to a lot of questions I had about early history and pre-history of the Earth. I did find it slightly hard reading at times, but it was so interesting that I was never bored. At present, I am reading it for the second time, to remind myself of the remarkable happenings of c.11,000 years ago.

Forget everything you learned in school about geography! Allan and Delair prove in their thorough investigation, that the topography of the Earth, as we now know it, was formed a mere 11500 years ago, when the Earth almost died. Obviously, the powers that be, wish to lull you into a false sense of security regarding our place in the cosmos. The truth is that space is not empty, and the Earth is constantly bombarded by material from the rest of the cosmos. You may find this book frightening and disorientating, which is exactly the way our ante- diluvial ancestors felt when the terrible "Phaeton" disaster occurred. This was a cosmic encounter with massive emissions from the Vela exploding super- nova in our region of the galaxy. Phaeton was like a miniature sun which blasted it's way through the solar system, disrupting the magnetic fields of the outer planets and pulling them out of orbit before it's apocalyptical encounter with Earth.On it's dreadful path, Phaeton captured material from Tiamat the tenth planet, which was exploded, and it's moon Kingu. As Phaeton approached the Earth, this rocky and watery debris bombarded the Earth, producing rains of death and destruction. Phaeton itself, the stellar material, did not actually collide with Earth, but the material it dragged with it, by it's own gravitation did. First the Earth dried up, and the seas boiled. Crops were desiccated and rendered inedible. Hellish firestorms broke out which sucked the oxygen from the land and triggered hurricanes on a scale now barely imaginable. When Phaeton came closer the seas were piled up mountainously, at the poles, and the Earth was pulled of it's rotational axis. As Phaeton set a course for the sun, the seas flooded the continents, which had already been catastrophically deranged, and drowned what was left of life on Earth.The physical keys which remain as evidence of the Phaeton disaster are the"drift deposits" and "Erratics" found all over the Earth. Traditionally these are viewed by physical geographers as evidence of an "ice age". Allan and Delair reject this notion completely and utterly confute Lyellian "Uniformitarianism". There is no way that these deposits could be forced up mountainsides and deep into caves by the slow age long, action of ice. Apocalyptic diluvial water on the other hand could.This book would make a good companion volume to Cremo and Thompson's "Forbidden Archeology". Put them together on your bookshelf! Part six of the book deals with the aftermath of the catastrophe, when humans were reduced to savagery and forced to eat meat. This was the beginning of the stone age, when all but a few of the remnants of humanity were able to once again build up a civilization. There is a good photograph of a prehistoric iron chain embedded in sedimentary rock discovered in California during 1952; what was this chain used for? There are other accounts of "anomalies" buried hundreds of feet underground; all evidence of a superior ante- diluvial civilization, wiped from the face of the Earth by this awful catastrophe. Surprisingly. Allan and Delair avoid the topic of Venus, the next nearest planet to the sun. I believe that Phaeton had a terrible cataclysmic affect on this planet too.

Looking at the other reviews I was prompted to write this one in an effort to redress the objectionable references to pseudo-science. Derek Allan spent a lifetime in teaching and in his spare time spent over 40 years collecting and cataloguing geological information and this book is the culmination of all that research. It was published in the latter years of his life which is why some of his sources appear outdated. However, unlike other authors on the end of the Pleistocene the authors of this book include a vast amount of material from Russian field research published in obscure and difficult to get hold of journals and as such this work has a novel twist that other western geological authors do not possess. There are some surprising similarities between this model and the more recent Firestone and West et al theory of a cometary airburst at the beginning of the Younger Dryas (the end of the Pleistocene). The actual chronology is different, with the Pliocene overlapping with the Pleistocene in the Allan and Delair model, an idea that has been overtaken by the sheer weight of modern research, and in particular ice cores, ocean sediment cores, and various dating methodologies. In that respect this book is in many ways out of date - but the research spans a very long period of time, research that is often ignored by modern geologists and commenters. As such, some factors in this book can be taken with an upraised eye, but generally they are pointing a finger at a real anomaly, something dramatic happened at the end of the Ice Ages. Earlier ice ages did not result in the extinction of large numbers of species, far from it as they appear to have thrived not only during the cold episodes but through the various warm interglacials, some of which were warmer than average temperatures nowadays. Then we have those huge depressions in the crust that are in places up to four thousand feet deep and filled with the mixed remains of animals, plants, trees, rocks and gravels etc They are evidence I would have thought but evidence that is generally passed over by scientists simply because they do not fit the pattern of the uniformitarian model. The same with all those Pleistocene bones, jumbled and mixed, regularly found by potholers in the 20th century, when most of Britain's cave systems were explored. The tar pits in California are another huge hotchpotch of mangled bones of extinct and surviving species that are not adequately explained. Comments in textbooks tend to concentrate on individual specimens and rarely describe or mention the sheer multitude of remains - you have to read books like this to find out about this factor. That is strange science in a way - ignore what does not fit the consensus. Not really very objective - and that goes for those reviews that describe this book as pseudo-science. Mainstream science is just as prejudiced - possibly more so. It has a series of consensus views and evidence is manipulated into that model. If the evidence does not fit it is ignored - and I've just illustrated how the extinctions at the Pleistocene are ignored because they raise embarrassing questions. Books like this raise embarrassing questions too - that is why they are dismissed as pseudo-science. Clear case of poppycock.

An astounding book, one that has cleared up many of the issues that have puzzled me about the Earth's evolution and the many curious geological features that classical theories failed to convince.